File size too big (Powerpoint 2000)

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I m casual user of PP. I just made a 7 page file. 6 of them have animation effect and image obj paste from other places. Then I found the size is abt 3.4 MB big that far larger than a floppy size but I m allowed to use one floppy disk only. When make zip file, it dosent help much, just reduce to 3.2MB. Is there anyway to compact the size, e.g. like what we can do in Access? Thanks for your help.
David

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Depending on the nature of the objects, you might be able to shrink them. Try right-clicking on an object, looking for an object sub-menu, and looking at your Convert… options. Typically “picture” is going to be the least-fat option. Does that help?

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Sorry, I cannot have the Object sub-menu by right-click on any of the images and cannot find this Object|Convert function else where. The images were produced by using “PrintScrn” key on the keyboard, then pasted on a MS Word page, cropped, then copied to PowerPoint page.

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Go and search for this issue (like insert image or something) I know we’ve dealt with this before.

Issue: If you do a ‘print screen’ and paste that into PP, it goes in as a BMP. HUGE FILE size!! paste that image into PaintShopPro or other image program and save as JPG or GIF. IF you save as JPG, watch your compression (reduction in quality). Find out where you can stand the reduction and use that. A 5000K BMP file could become a 176K JPG. Then insert the image file instead of pasting.

The other real kick is that removing an image or two may or may not reduce your file size!

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I’m stunned that 6 screenshots could consume so much memory. Maybe your screen is much bigger than mine.

I think someone has posted here about a macro or other tool to handle this problem, or at least to save the graphics out to files. The problem is preserving your work in sizing and animating them, and I’m not sure that is possible, but we can hope. Good luck in your (Lounge) search.

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Thanks for all the advices. I think the BMP type image is a source of the oversize. My PP pages do not just contain single screen shots for each, i.e. some page may contain up to 8 small sized of screen shots. But I think the reduced size images dont reduce from their original file size.

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Yes, the secret seems to be to not use “cut and paste” to import images. This, in my experience causes the file to increase in size by a factor of at least 3. Instead, create your images and store them as jpeg files. Then when you want to insert and image, go to Insert>Picture>From File. I find in this case that the file size increases almost exactly by the size of the image.

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Yes, I agree with some of the previous posts. The images you inserted were most likely bmp files. I helped a friend do a PP presentation for a wedding rehearsal dinner. She scanned all the pictures and then inserted them into PP. The overall PP file was huge. Investigation found that she saved all the scanned pictures as bmp formatted files. I had her reformat the pictures using jpeg, and it reduced the PP file tremendously.

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David,

I’ve just gone thru an exercise of creating image files of a screen shot (actually 2 screen shots). I’ll share my findings for what it’s worth:

– I was using Snag-It 6 to capture my screen shots. Snag-It gives a number of options on how to save the image (the Save As dialog has an Options button). The first option is actually the file type – bmp, jpg, tif, gif, png, etc – which is in the Save As dialog. Depending on what you choose will determine what options you can choose from for that file type. For example, if you choose bmp, you can choose 256 colors (8-bit color) uncompressed, 256 colors (8-bit color) compressed, 16-bit color, or 24-bit color. The more colors, the bigger the file but the better it looks. However, not much quality difference between 16- and 24-bit color from what I see (but I’m not a good judge of these things) and both better than 8-bit color. File sizes were 1.184MB for the 16-bit color and 1.770MB for the 24-bit color. Likewise, if you chose jpg, there were numerous options that gave different qualities (none good) and different sizes.

Bottom line here is that it might depend on the options your program provides and what you choose in determining the file sizes of the image. Some of my jpg’s were bigger than an 8-bit compressed bmp.

– Now I brought 2 bmp’s into powerpoint using insert picture. One was a 16-bit bmp screen shot with a size of 1.184MB and the other was a 24-bit bmp screen shot with a size of 1.899MB (don’t ask why they were different resolutions). Around each screen shot, each on a separate slide, I put a rectangular border. I added a 3rd slide with 4 bullets and a title. Total size of this ppt file was 271KB (repeat KB). PPT is known to have it’s own compression scheme. This is more than a 10:1 compression.

– Deleted the 2 images so all I have left is the 3rd slide with bullets and the 2 slides with frames but no images. Size is now 44KB.

– I made a copy of the above ppt file and deleted the 2 objects. I opened each bmp in MS Paint, selected the entire image, copied to the clipboard and did a paste special as a bitmap (as opposed to other choices). Resulting file size was 270KB.

– repeated the above but this time the paste special was using the choice of bitmap image object, which would allow me to double-click the image and have it opened up in Paint. This file was 424KB in size.

What does this all prove? BMPs can bloat file sizes but don’t always blame them. Be careful how you bring the image into PowerPoint. In general, I have found it better to work with Paste Special and make a wise choice on the method for pasting; paste (without special) will make a default choice which may not get you what you want. Word’s paste special will actually say one format will take up the least room. I keep original copies of all my images in case I have to edit them and can no longer do so in the program I pasted them into.

Hope some of this helps.

Fred

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